The APLE Collective stands for Addressing Poverty with Lived Experience (APLE). The APLE Collective are a growing collective that at the time of writing are made up of 11 organisations: founding members Thrive Teesside, ATD Fourth World, Expert Citizens and Dole Animators have been joined by Refugee and Asylum Participatory Action Research (RAPAR), Hartlepool Action Lab, Poverty Truth Community, Community Organisers, Starting Point, Single Parents Rights Campaign and LIFE (a lived experience group in York). Led by people with lived experience of poverty, the APLE Collective are a group of individuals and organisations who campaign on national, regional and local anti-poverty agendas. This book emerges from activism by the APLE Collective and presents three case-study chapters written by members. It introduces the APLE Collective and connects the work of Thrive Teesside, ATD Fourth World and Expert Citizens to that of the APLE Collective. Using the unique perspective of each member to interrogate the term ‘lived experience’, the book reflects the Collective’s approach to activism and engaging the voices of lived experience of poverty within their COVID-19 digital anti-poverty campaigns.

Lived experience of poverty, through the APLE lens

This book seeks to examine the concept of lived experience of poverty and what the term feels like and means in a practical sense, as well as what the inclusion of people’s lived experience means to the democratisation of knowledge. Poverty is multifaceted and intersectional and can be defined as ‘a preventable social harm’ (Lister, 2020:1). However, poverty is far more complex than this; indeed, Lister (2020) spends over 300 pages defining and discussing poverty as it relates to stigma and sits within broader structures of policy and individual agency. Lister (2020) acknowledges that Townsend’s (1979) bifurcation of poverty into absolute and relative definitions is useful but limited in today’s intersectional context. Poverty is about the complexity and insecurity of life on a low income and fewer opportunities to access good quality education, healthcare and work (Patrick, 2017). Poverty is also fundamentally multi-dimensional in nature (Bray et al, 2020), affecting all aspects of life in ways that can end up excluding people not only socially and economically, but politically too, reducing opportunities for voice, for activism and to be heard (ATD Fourth World, 2019; APLE Collective, 2020).